Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Enable Mouse to work as Lightgun in MAME

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If you're a big video game fan, chances are, you've tried MAME (unless you haven't heard of it...). MAME is an acronym for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. I've been trying to set up my installation to work with a mouse - worked a few years ago, but I've been on a lull, and have only recently started trying out some of the thousands of classic games available out there.

Anyway, if you haven't installed MAME yet, grab a copy from http://www.mamedev.org. Once you've extracted the file to a folder of your choice, right-click somewhere in the folder window (except for the folders and files being displayed) to open a context menu, mouse over to New, then click on Text Document. Type a name, such as StartMAME.txt, then open this file. After opening it, type cmd into the document, then save and close or close and click Yes when you are prompted to save the document.

After this, in Windows Explorer in the same folder, rename the file StartMAME.txt to a file with a .bat extension (right-click StartMAME.txt, press End key, press the period key (.), type bat. If the file's icon is still a notepad icon, click Tools on the top Menu (press Alt if there is no menu) > Folder Options > View > scroll to and uncheck Hide extensions for known file types.

Next, double-click StartMAME.txt.bat, then type mame --cc to create a configuration file, which is mame.ini. Now open mame.ini, and press Ctrl+F, then type mouse. This will be under the #CORE INPUT OPTIONS heading. Change the value from 0 to 1, and voila! Your PC mouse can now be used to move the cursor in lightgun-type games such as Terminator II: The Arcade Game, and Alien III: The Gun, and a host of others!

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